Test Plan Charlie Unplugged: An Interview with David Boyes - page 3

Meet David Boyes

March 21, 2001

By
Scott Courtney

You worked for, or with, IBM for a while. What led you to
leave IBM?

I worked for IBM, mostly as a consultant. IBM fascinates me, just because
of the sheer volume of good technology that comes out of that organization.
Very few people give IBM credit for their contribution to the industry over
the last 30 years. For example, the Winchester disk drive was an IBM
invention. They consistently produce vastly intelligent solutions that they
are consistently unable to market successfully. In that way they are kind of
like Xerox. That last step, making it work in that ecosystem environment that
I described, is where they consistently fail.

There are actually two ports of Linux to S/390 hardware.
One is IBM's officially supported version, and the other is the Bigfoot port
done primarily by Linas Vepstas. What are your feelings about the Bigfoot port
and its relationship with IBM's port?

I was peripherally involved in the Bigfoot port, in making the case to IBM.
IBM came to us before they decided to release Linux, and asked us, 'Why would
we want to do this?' We responded that, basically, you are going to do this
with us or we are going to do this without you. Bigfoot has some better ideas.
For example it was designed to run on any 370 architecture machine. It would
support more hardware. It was designed to work specifically under VM, and
would take advantage of things that are only available there. One of the
things the Bigfoot port did is that the stack grew in a different direction,
which made some things more efficient. There were a lot of things in Bigfoot
that were wise choices at the time.

Politically, it was done in a more typical Linux development environment.
It was public, people were hacking on stuff, more like the typical Intel
kernel. The IBM port was done more as a very quiet, very skunkworks, project:
Don't get the IBM badge holders in trouble. They were working mostly on their
own time without management approval. We did a lot of things in Bigfoot that
would have made the IBM port easier to do.

If I had to pick one thing that was an unwise choice on IBM's part, it was
the use of the relative instruction set so that it would only run on G2 or
higher. They could have used our Bigfoot work, but that would have been a very
difficult sell inside IBM. IBM is a hardware company, they want to sell
hardware. But if I'd done it, I would have done it differently.

Did Linas Vepstas get a raw deal from IBM when they passed
over his port and wrote their own?

I think Linas overreacted to a number of things. There is definitely a
culture in the Linux community that says, 'I've done something, that gives me
some value in the community.' This is something that was very personal to him,
and IBM came along with their port and sidelined him in the community. I don't
think anybody at IBM actively tried to give him a raw deal. It was a matter of
timing and specifically of IBM internal politics. Beyond that, I don't know. I
don't think he got a raw deal. The Boeblingen lab people have been forced to
be much more cooperative, and some of them have been uncomfortable with it.
They want to do things their way.

Over time they have become much more cooperative. It's been a learning
process from both sides of the community. They've had to learn to work with
the development community, and we've learned to work with some of their
internal constraints that we can't see.